By: ISABEL KERSHNER

Source: New York Times

The smoky alternative music club in downtown West Jerusalem was packed at 12:45 a.m. when a Palestinian hip-hop duo from East Jerusalem took the stage, rapping about the occupation, the police and love, among other things, mostly in Arabic.

The crowd, familiar with some of the lyrics, chanted along with the rappers, Muzi Raps and Raed Bassam Jabid. But it was a mostly young, Hebrew-speaking Israeli crowd, including soldiers home for a weekend furlough, filling the dance floor.

Such social interaction between Jews and Palestinians is rare here. The Palestinians call it “cultural normalization,” and many frown upon it.

Even as Israelis mark the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem in the June 1967 war, the Palestinians and most of the world consider the eastern half under occupation, and the city remains deeply divided. But after five decades, dealing with Israel has become unavoidable for residents of East Jerusalem.

“It’s a totally different world, a totally different life,” Muzi Raps, whose real name is Mustafa Jaber, said of his friends in West Jerusalem, which is predominantly Jewish. Mr. Jaber, 27, lives a short walk away, in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, across the old pre-1967 armistice line, now an invisible boundary.

East Jerusalem’s 320,000 Palestinians now make up 37 percent of the city’s population. Suspended between Israel and the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority exercises limited control, many of them exist in a kind of political limbo.

Some live a divided life, working in a West Jerusalem cafe or fixing cars by day, then protesting by night. Others put on an inscrutable public front while navigating individual peace accords with Israelis.

By now, half the East Jerusalem Palestinian labor force works in West Jerusalem, according to the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, an independent Israeli study center. And below the surface, the mood of outright defiance seems to be shifting.

More than 5,000 students in East Jerusalem high schools are now studying for the bagrut, the Israeli matriculation examination that eases enrollment in Israeli universities, up from about 1,000 in 2014, according to City Hall. And 26 East Jerusalem schools offer the Israeli curriculum, taught in Arabic, as an option, compared with 161 that teach only the tawjihi curriculum of the Palestinian Authority. The number of Palestinian students registering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has increased in recent years. Palestinian families applying for Israeli citizenship — a longstanding taboo — rose to a record 1,081 in 2016, up from a few dozen in 2003.

Yet experts on both sides say the reasons for these shifts are often practical, and do not necessarily signal a desire on the part of East Jerusalem’s Palestinians to buy into Israeli society.

“There is a serious crisis vis-à-vis 50 years of Israeli control and its system creeping in,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, the director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, an independent East Jerusalem research institute. “There is no national leadership or national agenda. Everybody is trying their own way, whether in education, housing, land issues.”

“Yes,” he added, “some are taking an Israeli passport as a tool of survival. But nobody took their soul.”

Days after the club performance in West Jerusalem, Mr. Jaber and I were walking to his home, in a tiny, arched nook off a bustling bazaar in the Muslim Quarter, near a gateway to the Al Aqsa Mosque compound. He had barely walked three steps before two armed Israeli border police officers stopped him and asked to check his identity card.

Hardly incognito, he was sporting a large “Muzi Raps” pendant on a thick gold chain, a Tupac T-shirt, sneakers and a baseball cap with the saying, “United we stand, drink till we fall.”

For Israel, the capture of the Old City, with its ancient holy sites, from Jordanian control was the emotional pinnacle of its swift victory in 1967. It is the nucleus of the city that Israel has declared its sovereign and eternal capital. It is also the hotly contested core of the conflict.

Outside Mr. Jaber’s house, the alleys bristled with police cameras. A group of khaki-clad officers stood guard behind protective metal barriers at one of the Stations of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa.

Israeli flags festooned the balconies of apartments scattered through the Muslim Quarter now inhabited by nationalist religious Jews. But when their children return from school, or one of the adults wants to go out, they are escorted by civilian-clothed bodyguards. Flanked from the front and behind, they pass by wall plaques commemorating past and recent Jewish victims of Palestinian knife attacks. Since the fatal stabbing of an Israeli border police officer this month, the Israeli government is considering turning the nearby Damascus Gate into a security zone.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Israel greatly expanded Jerusalem’s city limits, taking in some two dozen West Bank villages, and annexed the eastern side of the city in a move that has never been internationally recognized.

It set about building huge Jewish neighborhoods, or settlements, over the lines, creating a patchwork of populations. The Palestinians were granted permanent residency status, making them free to move and work anywhere in Israel and eligible for Israeli social benefits.

Today, East Jerusalem is cut off from the West Bank by an Israeli system of walls, fences and checkpoints that went up in the early 2000s amid the suicide bombings of the second Palestinian intifada. And interviews with dozens of Palestinian residents exposed a fragmented, confused society.

Up to a third of the city’s Palestinian residents live in cheaper, often slumlike areas that are technically part of Jerusalem, but that Israel placed beyond the barrier, in a netherworld with an even more uncertain future.

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While the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank demands a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, some of the city’s Palestinians describe the Palestinian Authority, which Israel bars from operating in East Jerusalem, as a corrupt and lawless “mafia,” and many say they want no part of it.

“We have our rights here, where we live,” said Ola Hedra, 35, an English teacher from the A-Tur neighborhood on the Mount of Olives. “Not everything — but it’s better than life under the Palestinian Authority.”

Ahmad Abu al-Hawa, 21, who works at a family store selling juice, ice cream and cigarettes in A-Tur, shops in West Jerusalem to buy fashionable clothes. But he said he did not know any Israelis, whom he called “our enemy, the occupiers.” He said he had close to 20 cousins and friends in prison for throwing stones and firebombs at Israeli forces, a daily occurrence in this tense neighborhood.

Soon after he spoke, one cousin returned after completing a 30-month term and was greeted with loud music, Palestinian flags and posters with his portrait, even though neighbors said the police had warned the family not to celebrate.

The Palestinian residents complain of high taxes and fines and a lack of municipal services. More than 80 percent of the city’s Palestinian children live in poverty, according to government statistics, compared with about 30 percent of Israeli children. While permanent residents can vote in the municipal — but not national — elections, the Palestinians of Jerusalem overwhelmingly boycott the vote for City Hall.

Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, a conservative and a former venture capitalist, said that he ran the city according to a “philosophy of inclusiveness,” and that he was working to deal with the neglect in Arab areas, including a severe shortage of classrooms.

Palestinian and Jewish residents frequent some of the same city parks and shopping malls in West Jerusalem, and some Israelis have also been reaching across the divide.

Still, the Israeli government has displayed some ambivalence in embracing the Palestinian residents. The rate of applicants from East Jerusalem who were granted Israeli citizenship sharply dropped in the past few years. The Israeli Interior Ministry said individual background checks took time, especially given the application overload.

The ambiguity is mutual.

Muhammad Sbeih, 45, the owner of a pet shop in the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina, said that his Israeli permanent residency card “does not represent me,” and that when he traveled to Ramallah in the West Bank in his Israeli yellow-plated car, “they treat me like I’m Jewish.”

Like many East Jerusalem Palestinians, he cherishes his connection to Al Aqsa, among the holiest sites in Islam, and now the essence of many East Jerusalem Palestinians’ identity. Mr. Sbeih works as a muezzin at a local mosque and said he would ultimately like to see a caliphate in the area.

“Islam is what’s left,” he said.

A principal of an East Jerusalem boys’ middle and high school, where hand-drawn picture signs at the entrance urge pupils to bring their brains, not guns, will be offering one class teaching the Israeli curriculum starting in September. But the principal said he was offering it to the weaker students because the Israeli bagrut system was more flexible.

Both the Palestinian Authority and many Palestinian parents strongly oppose what they see as an Israeli attempt to “Judaicize” the education system and undermine Palestinian identity. Israel is offering these schools financial incentives.

In middle-class Beit Hanina, the new School of Science and Technology offers only the Israeli curriculum. Muhammad Abu Khdeir, a teacher there and a relative of a Palestinian teenager killed by Jewish extremists in 2014, said: “The problem is we don’t know exactly where we are. Are we here or there?”